Thursday, Sep 13, 2012, 12:35 pm

People Who Can’t Teach, Write About Teachers

Email this article to a friend

I’ve spent the day keeping up with a flood of nonsense about the Chicago Teachers Union. The deluge hasn’t been coming from the Right, but from a certain subset of technocratic liberals.

I don’t accuse them of arguing in bad faith, they’re just being themselves. And in doing so they’re laying bare the spirit that sustains them.

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an editorial called “Chicago Teachers’ Folly,” claiming that “Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea.” The editorial is stunning, even by the New York Times’ standards. It places much of the blame for the strike on a “personality clash between the blunt mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the tough Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis.”

What’s politics and the scope of history when we have personalities to dissect?

The piece cites a widely misleading average teacher salary of $75,000. Misleading not only because the figure is incorrect, but because the strike wasn’t about wages in the first place. This last point is what also frustrates about Dylan Matthews’ graphic detours about Chicago teacher compensation. It’s not that he is willfully wrong, he just shifts the debate over to something that isn’t the issue.

Matt Yglesias also misses the mark with his post on teachers union. Though Yglesias believes public sector employees have the right to organize, a belief that sets him apart from the most odious of Beltway journalists, he makes a rather obvious point about who pays them:

CTU members get what they want, that's not coming out of the pocket of "the bosses" it's coming out of the pocket of the people who work at charter schools or the people who pay taxes in Chicago.

This is, contra cries from the Left, is qualitatively different from a stance I discussed in my post earlier this week:

[The argument] rests on the idea that public employees, since they’re funded by taxpayers, are somehow siphoning funds from “productive” private sectors of the economy. Ignored is the fact that these employees also produce goods and services, and should have a say on the conditions under which they work.

Those critics see any agency by public sector employees as parasitic. Ygelsias, however, just suggests a knee-jerk defense of public worker demands is wrongheaded, even though a similar stance may be justified in the corporate world. But in doing so he draws a distinction between private and public sector employees that I don’t think is productive. Moreover like the New York Times, he’s implicitly reducing the teachers’ struggle to a bread-and-butter trade union dispute. Anyone who’s read the Chicago Teacher Union’s literature or followed how that organization has interacted with the community at large knows the struggle represents social unionism at its finest.

This isn’t trade-union consciousness. It’s class consciousness.

That’s why the conclusion of the Times’ editorial is especially wrong. It claims that “the differences between the two sides were not particularly vast, which means that this strike was unnecessary.” But what’s actually going on is a pitched battle between those who want to further neoliberalize the social safety net and those who want to keep the education sector, to a degree, well-funded and de-commodified.

The clash between unabashedly pro-CTU leftists like Corey Robin and liberals like Matt Yglesias is rooted in something far broader. It reminds me of a quote I bring up from time to time by Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. He said the Left bases itself on the experience of history, while the Right is the mere expression of surrender to the situation of the moment. The Left can have political ideology, while the Right has nothing but tactics.

Matthews and Yglesias, though on the center-left in the American context, have little history or ideology. They can’t see the beyond graphs and minutiae. Yes, radicals can do with a bit more empiricism, but these wonks can do with recognizing the implications of political disputes, which go beyond Chicago and beyond even public education, can’t be understood within the dialectic of an Excel sheet.

As for the New York Times writers, they can’t see how industrial conflicts throughout history, no matter their immediate consequences of interupting the functioning of daily life—well actually, precisely because of those consequences—ultimately propel society forward. And yes, help children and their families.

Out of curiosity and with all due respect, how much teaching experience do you have yourself Bhaskar? Cheers

Posted by patwater on 2012-12-27 15:18:37

It boils down to this: anyone who has ever had a bad boss or boss of boss at their job who made dumb decisions about their workplace ought to get why the "school reform" movement is intellectually bankrupt. It is premised on the idea of literally "Waiting for Superman," i.e. that every principal is a Geoffrey Canada waiting to be unleashed on their lazy employees. If this was a serious effort to reform education they would propose a more intelligent method to measure teachers that was actually fair and objective. They would support holding principals and administrators accountable for their failures with some kind of 180 review function (e.g. when a Principal or Superintendent spends a bunch of budget overhauling the curriculum for the school with the latest snake oil sold to them by a testing company, the teachers ought to be able to sound the alarm). Instead, the aim of school reformers is to make the policy environment into ideal conditions for privatization, where administrators are essentially forced to spend budget on third parties who charge a large markup to have a margin on their work retraining the curricula toward testing. This "omniscient administrator" theory of education policy could only make sense to people who have never had a real job with a bad boss and a work environment that suffered as a result, or else they lack empathy. Where Yglesias, Kristoff, Matthews, Davis Guggenheim and, yes, Barack Obama are concerned, it's a problem of the former case. With Rahm Emanuel and George W Bush, it's both the former and the latter.

Posted by Mark on 2012-09-17 09:28:51

Great article! AND, you quote Kolakowski to boot!! it's already a good monday

Posted by pholkhero on 2012-09-17 08:23:43

It's not that so many ostensibly liberal pundits are arguing in bad faith, it's that they are uncritical vessels of reformist cant. All the talking points of the corporate education reform complex - merit pay, high stakes testing, the blinkered rhetoric of the achievement gap, charter schools, etc. - are repeatedly channeled through their disinformed comments.

Posted by Michael Fiorillo on 2012-09-13 20:13:32

Just terrific, Bhaskar. You get it. So few do. And you know to tell it, too. The issue of social unionism is especially telling given how the union is pushing rap-around services for every school. That means a full-time medical clinic, a social worker, counseling that's more than counting credits with a caseload thats often in the hundreds--the mid hundreds. It means schools as community centers. It means two meals a day, not just one. And that's just for starters. Again, great job.